


Vocabulary Words

by Tvieandli



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: M/M, Mental Health Issues, Past Child Abuse, Suicude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 10:56:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 14
Words: 11,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1646132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tvieandli/pseuds/Tvieandli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bottom.</p><p>     The lowest point or part.</p><p>     Reaching the lowest point before recovery.</p><p>     The buttocks.</p><p>     In a position lower than or inferior to all others.</p><p>What Spirit was saying was that he wasn't going to be inferior.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bottom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes for later in the story. Maka's mom has no name. Kaili = Maka's mom.

Bottom.

The lowest point or part.

Reaching the lowest point before recovery.

The buttocks.

In a position lower than or inferior to all others.

"I'm not going to be on the bottom."

What Spirit was saying was that he wasn't going to be inferior. He would not be the floor upon which Stein walked.

"Alright."

Stein had never planned on making him lower. 

His lips tingled from where they'd met flesh and he pressed them together in an attempt to immortalize the feeling on them. Spirit dragged the back of his hand over his own in one of those innocuous movements that manages to be earth shattering in its silent significance. "Get off me and don't touch me" that action said.

Stein smiled ruefully.

He'd never really made a positive mark on the world. The only ones he'd ever made were on Spirit, and all of them were ugly. Some of them bled and gushed and oozed with their pain. It was balanced out in the field though when Spirit failed sometimes to stop physical blows, letting them land on his meister's body.

"Wait," he said, when his weapon moved to drift away. Spirit stopped and turned back to him, eyes calculating. He let Stein sidle back into his sphere of existence, allowed their heat to meld on the air between them again. 

He was taller, just a bit older, broader, farther into the trenches of puberty. Stein drew up on his toes and set his lips gently against the other boy's again. They were still. Spirit's blue eyes peered at him, ruined and torn out by his unvoiced possessions. Then it twisted, Spirit stepped in, leaned a bit, pushed until their mouths melded softly, and pulled back.

He didn't wipe the feeling away that time, simply retreating back a few steps. 

"This doesn't make me a girl," he said, holding a hand between them as if it would form into a shield rather than a blade.

"I never thought you were a girl," Stein assured him, stepping back on his own to give the sharp shy dog its so desperately needed space. 

Lines of buried abuse raised faults in Spirit's face as he turned it away with a wry smile. "Whatever," he said softly.

-

Bottom.

One who takes on the submissive role in a sexual encounter.

A homosexual male who allows himself to be anally penetrated.

Research was the key. It was the only thing Stein's parents had ever taught him that proved to be vitally useful other than basic language skills. He was young and inexperienced but he was aware of that and it was that knowledge that allowed him to realize that the women Spirit spent his time with were not.

Stein had rarely been touched by other humans in any way other than the violent ones before he met Spirit. Now, touching was mandatory, an endeavor to find a cadence between their wavelengths and form a groove that their resonance would slide into naturally. The truth of it though was that touch was meant to be voluntary. Humans were supposed to want to touch each other when they were close.

Spirit did not want to touch his partner. When they were supposed to touch, he eased into it the same way a porcupine eases backward into a pillow case. When he was unprepared to be touched, he dealt with it about as well as a threatened pit viper.

Stein quickly learned to keep his distance, skirting around their mandatory encounters and avoiding all others near constantly. That was just until he learned though, just until he trained himself well enough to touch another person properly. 

Sometimes, when Spirit was truly quiet all the way though himself, Stein could get away with pressing the palms of his hands to his weapon's skin. On even rarer occasions, Spirit would make sounds of appreciation under the contact. Stein craved those occasions where he managed to touch the right way.

He spent hours pouring over library books, learning. He went through psychology databases with the same voracity as he sped through articles on homosexual intercourse. Spirit made fun of him for spending too much time at his desk and not enough outside.

When he was alone, he turned off the lights and trained himself to be properly pliant.


	2. Penetrated

Penetrated.

Learned, or known.

Pierced, or passed through.

Entered, or forced.

Seen through.

Effected deeply.

Spirit got used to it. Warmed up. Stein eased him into it slowly, somewhat timid the whole time. 

He wouldn't have. He would have stopped and never touched Spirit again but the resonance was strengthening slowly and he didn't know if his body could sustain the unstable connection during combat for much longer. 

They slept in the same bed most nights, stripped down to nothing in the hot summer, sweat sticking them to sheets as they avoided touching at all costs. Sometimes, Stein would wake up overarm, feeling like someone had started a sauna underneath the covers and find Spirit wound around him, holding tight. 

Kisses slowly became deeper, gained slightly sexual connotations. 

Spirit hated it. 

"I'm not a girl," he would say over and over as if Stein was telling him he was.

Stein would be quiet through those episodes, reassure when they finished and hold his tongue until Spirit accepted it. He began to watch women, girls. Especially when they were with Spirit. He adopted their sexual advances and body language, hoping it would be less threatening, more inviting, more proper. 

When it happened, Spirit turned him face down and held him still so he would be quiet, sounds muffled in pillows and sheets. 

Spirit's hands were steady and sure of themselves. Stein liked to pretend that this was somewhat what it felt like to be wielded. Certainly it took the same kind of trust. Spirit had never trusted him in any way close to this. He stayed quiet, swallowed sounds, thinking it would perhaps only be further damning to Spirit's strange moral compass. 

Regardless of the restrictions, or weather Spirit was involved just to sate his own needs, Stein liked it. 

Within three weeks of sexual intercourse becoming a regular thing between the two of them, they hit the sweet spot in that natural resonance groove. Stein felt it carve its way into his soul like a scar, a frequency he would never forget. This was his bicycle. The thing he would be able to do even when nothing else was left to him.

Spirit was dark on the inside, washed out and barren like the land that had raised him. His matched the desolate, salted farms of his home. It was like he had receded as far as he could into himself, walling whatever he held most dear up beyond anyone's reach. 

He looked into his partner and he saw the folly of ignorant intervention, failure to listen. Within himself, Spirit was like Stein if Stein had just managed to be nine paces closer to human. 

After they'd found the key, it was easy to slip into. Spirit pushed him onto his back and with cursory eye contact there it was, the presence of his partner's soul, thrumming broken, but strong beside his own.

-

Penetrated.

Compromised.

Weakened.

"Stop treating me like a girl."

Stein bought a dress. 

He was little, small, and underfed most of the time because he never could remember to eat on his own. Pubescence had yet to fully set in. He hoped he wouldn't look ridiculous. 

If Spirit was so caught up on someone having to be feminized, Stein supposed he could take that hit too. In the end it didn't seem like it would be that bad anyway. Women did manage to go about their entire lives wearing dresses quite comfortably and he didn't understand what was bad about them. Well other than the obvious seeing as they were mostly typical people and as such generally alien to him. 

Spirit was quiet when they stood chest to chest. From the look in his eyes, Stein knew he was aware that it was a challenge. 

"Are you expecting me to wear-"

"No."

"Why are you-"

"Because you're so insistent on one of us being the girl."

Spirit blinked at him, and looked very hard at the outfit for a while. 

"I suppose you aren't fucking around then," he said lamely.

"Thought it'd make you feel better," Stein replied.

Spirit was one of the most expressive people Stein had ever met. Of course, with how Stein was still learning secondary facial expressions, Spirit's face was leagues beyond his meager ability to interpret.

Spirit accepted the strange little offering. In the morning, they didn't speak of it. Instead, Stein made bacon for breakfast and left it on Spirit's bedside table as he trotted out the door early to make up some study time at the library. Spirit would never verbally acknowledge these things beyond the ways in which society forced him to. He wasn't much of one for 'thank you's.

Stein accepted that though. Why should Spirit say thank you? He was always the one to sacrifice. And when he failed he never had to apologize. Besides, he'd said it himself, apologies were admissions of guilt- he didn't have to feel guilty until he apologized. No one liked feeling guilty.

Spirit spent the day surrounded by girls. Stein kept his distance because he was the weird friend and his lack of popularity was apparently catching. They didn't speak outside of classes for the most part most days. For some reason that was disappointing. Maybe Stein had thought things would change.

For the life of him he could not imagine why.

He felt as if some blow had been landed on his armor coating when he became close to Spirit. He felt as if the strength was bleeding away from his self formed ego, making him further defined by the judgment of others in ways he had not been previously. It was frustrating.


	3. Fuck

Fuck.

To have Intercourse.

To Ruin.

To Damage.

To Defile.

Spirit's hands tended not to be light or kind. When he fucked Stein sometimes it was like he wasn't actually there but some other place, fucking someone else, fingers set on wrenching that person apart. Sometimes, he would leave afterward, barricade himself in the bathroom and think the running shower water was loud enough to keep Stein from hearing him cry.

They never talked about that either. There were a lot of things they didn't talk about.

The resonance got shaky on Spirit's end again. Again it fell on Stein to pick up the slack on missions. 

He'd hoped that that was over. Then he sprained his ankle trying to land on his feet after Spirit failed to block for him.

His weapon was quiet when they'd made their collection and Stein took the time to survey the damage he'd taken. Sprained ankle, ligaments over stretched, bruises and cuts all over his body. He failed to ask if Spirit was fucking him on purpose even if he wanted to. He didn't want to know the answer.

If it was true, Spirit was always right, and the right always had reasons. It would be justified and Stein didn't want to be forced to face his inadequacies then.

"Can you help me walk?" he asked. 

Spirit looked at him, sized him up, and it seemed like he was going to just leave, let Stein figure his own way back to the hotel but he didn't. He was warm against Stein's side when he looped an arm under the smaller boy's shoulder and supported him away. It was comforting and somewhere deep in his bones, Stein craved the contact.

Their hotel room had two beds, but that night, Spirit draped his arm over Stein's waist and slept with his breath breaking like waves on his meister's temple. The groove was there then, fitting together seamlessly into a resonance. 

The next morning, Spirit presented him with a pair of crutches and kept his distance. They rarely associated beyond standing beside one another in public after all. 

If there was something nice in the world, it was Spirit. Spirit was attractive and he spoke eloquently. He navigated social situations with deft perception and ease. He was calm and patient and always there. When he yelled he had reasons. When he was angry he had reasons. He was always right.

Stein wished he could do better by him, be presentable, good enough to be associated with and called friend. He envied Sid with the same veracity that he sometimes wished he was a pretty girl. He hated the in-between that he fell into where he was neither attractive as a friend or as a love interest but couldn't be dismissed or ignored because he was the partner.

He pressed himself into his seat in the airplane and poured over everything again and again, terrified that Spirit would put in a transfer request and leave him alone to try with a less capable meister who allowed the resonance to be unfinished. 

If he'd just been better at filling the gaps and taking the stress this wouldn't have happened. His fingernails carved his palms in a cheep imitation of the ritual, deprecative self scarring he so adamantly refused to allow himself to participate in, but envied. 

Spirit read, buried his face in books and kept to himself for the entirety of the flight. He had enough pity to help Stein down the unloading stairs when they found their way back to Death City soil. After that they did not touch again until they were home.

Spirit sat him on the couch and knelt in front of him, hands cradling the other boy's ankle gently, rolling it, pressing lightly to test its tenderness. It was soothing, and the desire to ask for more was there but Stein kept silent, let him pull away and not meet gazes. He came back with an ace bandage and wrapped it before getting a chair and ice to prop it up.

"After fifteen minutes put a heat pack on it," he instructed softly.

"I know," Stein replied. He resented, sometimes, Spirit's need to inform him of things it was obvious he already knew. 

"I'll go to school and report our success. I won't be home for a couple hours."

He was going to get drunk. 

Drink was his best friend after all.


	4. Love

Love.

Deep affection.

Romantic attraction.

Naiveté.

Childish Optimism.

No one had ever said they loved him before Spirit did it. He was skeptical of it because in all the time he'd lived he had no proof that love existed. He didn't know if he could believe or not. If it was a lie, it would be like finding out that Krampus wasn't real again, and that he wasn't going to eat bullies over Christmas break.

Spirit professed his love quite often and to quiet a few people though. It wasn't as if Stein could allow himself to feel too special for it. He curbed his enthusiasm.

Regardless of whether he believed it or not, or whether he believed it was even something within his reach if it did exist, he repeated those words back, and it gave some mild comfort. He got the feeling it was like a balm on a third degree burn, likely to make you more prone to infection but at least the tiniest bit soothing. 

Sometimes, it made Spirit smile. The longer they stayed together the more often Stein felt like he saw that. It had been so rare in the beginning, and when it had been present it had been false, but now things were beginning to change. 

He didn't smile in front of other people, and it began to feel like a secret he'd only ever shared with Stein. Their thing. Something they did together, for one another and no other reason. He lived to make Spirit smile. It was his favorite thing in the world.

Spirit was his favorite person. 

The only person who felt real and actualized.

Maybe this was how normal people felt about all their friends. Maybe this was just what it was like to like someone. Maybe he was off and his judgment was wrong. How could he trust his instincts when he had no frame of reference, no real world counter part on which to base his expectations or observations? 

He would die for Spirit though which was something he legitimately could say he would not do for anyone else. There was not a single other human on this earth that Stein would value saving over himself. His grandfather had told him once that that was love, that you could only find that in your war buddies, people you fought along side and died along side and cried along side.

If Spirit wasn't that to him, he didn't know what else that could possibly be describing. He was almost inclined to just accept it. This is love. Love looks like this. It would be comforting. The constants that were the scientific method disallowed him from being comfortable.

Spirit was just as damaged, although with much more reason. His answers were no more assured than Stein's. It didn't matter that he was older or that he said he knew more. Stein felt stupid fumbling in the dark.

Marie often talked all about love, but in the end she'd never said it to anyone outside her family. Sid had lived too much for anyone their age and even he had nothing concrete to add. In the end it was all lies and misdirection, people editing their histories to sound happier than they really were, glossing over problems and ignoring blatant red flags. 

-

 

Love.

A lie told to children in order to get them to be unendingly disappointed with their loveless lives. 

Spirit stopped spending so much time at parties. They found an easy timbre once more. They resonated as easily as breathing, navigated each other with few hiccups. They melded. Most of the time, Stein felt less like one person and more like a part of a greater whole.

He stopped making decisions with only himself in mind, actively accounting for Spirit's desires even without being asked to. It seemed natural. Surely it wasn't perfect, he still missed things rather often and needed things to be explained slowly sometimes because he'd missed micro expressions or social cues somewhere along the way but he was learning. 

Sometimes, when it was dark he allowed himself to feel proud because he forgot that pride begat ego and ego was the destroyer of all things. 

When Spirit had left home, it had been quickly and slightly illegally. Stein didn't know the details, but he did know that Spirit had never technically been given the proper parental consent to be legitimately enrolled in the DWMA within US government jurisdiction. It was a good thing that Death City was a sovereign nation on the grounds that government really held no power in the face of a force of nature like Death. 

Spirit didn't like to talk about it. He avoided the subject like the plague.

The phone call came on a saturday. Stein was the person who picked up. The person on the other end of the line shared Spirit's accent when they asked for him. 

"Why?"

"I am his mother."

"Hang up the fucking phone," Spirit told him when Stein asked him to take the receiver. "Hang it the fuck up now."

If he'd been a dog his hackles would have been raised, body tensed in a tight ball of fear. His rage shook deep within him like a caged, and declawed beast smacking its toothless jaws together, still riding the intent to kill despite the fact that anxiety had crippled it so. 

Silently, Stein had let the receiver fall back into the cradle. 

Spirit balled himself up in bed and barricaded the doors. He stopped going to school and his grades fell again. When he did leave the apartment, it was to go to parties, get drunk, and pick up chicks. They stopped touching. They stopped looking at each other, making eye contact. Their resonance fell to pieces again.

Time passed like that, and Stein tried to give his weapon the space he needed but the longer it took the less Spirit was inclined to even try, holding him at arms length and not letting him any closer. 

He refused to go to the doctor and he did not let anyone touch him. He drank until he was drunk without drinking and he slept for what seemed like years.

His mother called again. She told Stein how much she missed her baby in broken English, sobbed softly into the mouthpiece, and lied. She lied about a lot of things, but Stein found little truths in her. Spirit's father liked alcohol too. He was mean. How mean he was, and the extent of his love for alcohol were never openly admitted, but it gave him a foundation off of which to work.

It felt dirty, but he was able to sooth the woman without annoying Spirit too much all while learning things that would maybe help him understand.

For Christmas that year, the Soviets fell. Stein got a call from Spirit's mother, weeping on the other end of the line with joy. Ukraine was free. She wanted to come to America and see her son.

He hung up the phone and did not answer it again. If just hearing that they'd been paid a phone call by family was enough to make Spirit recede completely back to where he'd been when they first partnered up two years ago, Stein didn't want to see what seeing family would do. No one was coming to America.

Spirit hissed nasty things about greed for money and citizenship. Stein tried not to let himself get in the way of real problems like family. He kept his distance, hoped Spirit would sort it out on his own.


	5. Happy

Happy.

In good spirits.

Jovial.

Ignorant.

Selfish.

It was the worst Christmas present ever. Spirit threw empty beer bottles at the side of the Russian embassy to celebrate and almost got them both arrested. Stein kept it from him that his mother had wanted to physically be on the same continent as him again. Even worse was Stein feared she wanted to bring his father.

There were books full of things that Stein did not know about Spirit's father. Things he didn't need to know that Spirit didn't want him to that he was okay allowing to lie in the dark. He felt almost as if it would be a violation if he ever truly met his partner's parents. He hoped that woman took his response for the "no" it was, but knew enough about alcoholics to be aware that audacity ran in the liquor. 

The sound of Nevermind burned deep into Stein's ears though the hollow cardboard of Spirit's bedroom door as he sat in the hallway. The strip of wall between that door and the living room became a wax cylinder recording of the dance steps his fingernails made alone in the dark when he started to see things.

Spirit grew more and more distant, left less and less it seemed. Anxiety started to crawl up in his throat, thoughts of blades and sharp things and blood mirroring the things he did to neighborhood animals to feel like he had some sort of power in his life, over the world if not over himself. The thoughts that lingered in his peripheral vision slowly bled across his eyes like colorful hemorrhages.

Marie knocked on the door and told him it was January. 

The apartment smelled like teen spirit. His weapon's empty bottles lying open in the trash, their last dregs distilling further and further in the unseasonal Nevada heat. It turned his empty stomach as he let the girl in.

She was carrying bags that smelled heavily of food and nourishment, things the walls of their tiny apartment had not seen in what seemed like an eternity. 

"Lord Death asked me to come," she said, pulling tupperware after tupperware out of the bag and stacking them on the kitchen table. She'd made soups and breads. They were still hot in their holding cells. He felt as if he would be sick for a moment looking at and smelling the food.

When was the last time he'd eaten? He couldn't remember for the life of him. He must have spent his whole life rotting in that hallway, legs pushed up against the wall so that he questioned which way gravity was pulling him. How long had it been? How long had he been there?

It occurred to him that he did not remember Spirit leaving his room once in the last million years and he felt panic pool underneath his tongue, telling him horrible stories of actualized ideology. He tripped over his own ankle trying to turn on his heal to get back down the hallway.

His skin was tight over his ribs when they collided with Spirit's door. Kurt Cobain was still singing inside, still the new album, same songs over and over, boring into Stein's brain. How long had it been?

Spirit was lying on his side in bed, the covers pulled up to his chin. His eyes looked ripped out again, torn away and ruined. Whatever had been there was gone now, he was a quickless candle. He didn't move, but he was breathing, alive, physically sound.

"Marie brought dinner," he said dumbly.

Spirit grunted.

"It's soup."

"Soup?" Spirit sounded like he hadn't spoken in years, like his throat was as home to cobwebs as Stein's felt.

"Do you want some?"

Weakly, Spirit nodded, and slowly, he dragged himself up onto his feet, blanket still wrapped around him. Stein stopped the tape before they left.

"Lord Death told me someone had filed a complaint and eventually it got back to him because no one else seemed to be able to do anything about it," Marie said. "What he told me is that the two of you had been disturbing the peace for a while, but now I'm just pretty sure you were playing Nirvana for three days straight or something."

She seemed too jovial for that to be an actual jab but Stein was still uncomfortable with the wording, fearful of some passive aggressive trap. 

"Nah," Spirit said. "I listened to other things too."

No one asked him to elaborate.

Marie stocked their fridge with her tupperware and left them, with the warning that if she was told to come over again, she would forcibly mother them until they started acting like adults.

They stood there side by side in the silence she left for a moment. Then, Spirit turned, took a seat on the couch and turned the TV on. The original Godzilla movie was still in the VCR, half watched because Stein had derided the special effects. It picked up seamlessly where they had left it, throwing them back into a sense of normalcy.

It felt light. Maybe happy. Good.

Stein slept in Spirit's bed that night, the two of them pressed back to back, bare skin sticking. It was comforting.

The next morning they did not touch overly much. Stein avoided Spirit's flesh, avoided their hands bumping accidentally, avoided being too close. Spirit didn't seem to notice or care outwardly but Stein hoped it at least made some difference not to be pressured. He was never sure when he was pressuring.


	6. Trust

Trust.

Faith.

Idealism.

Once, when they'd been younger, when Stein was still twelve and they knew hardly anything about one another, Stein had panicked. Spirit had sat on the floor, coaxing him out from behind the couch. "I'll never leave," he'd promised then.

Stein wanted to trust him but Spirit was consistently inconsistent.

They fell back into harmony for the spring and the summer. They managed to save up enough money to go to a concert, and Spirit wasn't ashamed to be seen with him in public. Seeing them at the same time, it became very apparent though, that Spirit was almost exactly a tiny redheaded Kurt Cobain. Apparently, Stein wasn't the first to notice.

Spirit told him while waiting in line for the bathroom that some of the girls talked about it sometimes. Some of them tried to use it as an insult, others were on board with Spirit about it being just about the awesomest thing. 

"No wonder you like them so much," Stein joked. 

The songs that had seemed like hell repeating months ago took on positive connotations.

When Spirit was upset, there was always Nirvana to calm him down. It felt like the personification of Spirit's demons could be held up like an example of how to make it through what he was going through. 

He picked up a tape of Bleach at a music shop, and gave it to Spirit for his birthday. 

Together, they waited in earnest for the next album drop, gobbled up interviews and tv spots, read magazines like addicts all hints at what would be next. Any dropped singles, anything. Stein felt like his involvement made Spirit feel more sure in himself. He felt like it helped. He hoped it did. It was an easy way to make Spirit smile anyway.

Beyond that, sometimes, Stein felt like lyrics or sounds lent small insight into his partner's life.

They began kissing again, working their way back up as if it were new because Spirit seemed reluctant to accept that these were just repeated scenes in the screen play of his life, the ones that got cut to streamline things. 

It was listening to Nirvana, that Spirit asked Stein for the trust it took to accept drugs from someone. Stein had never even had a drink when Spirit was handing him cannabis. It was alright though, he assured himself. This was just further proof that he had made it to good enough town. He was cool enough now. 

His third year in Shibusen passed by in a laggy haze of mary jane, and calm, sure trust. An even, patterned relationship with Spirit.

They spent a nice Christmas together doing whatever it was they did together. Their dynamic was still strange, somewhere between friends and lovers, but he no longer felt the need to pin it down and label it forcefully. It simply seemed to be alright existing on its own, evolving with its own mind.

They saved up more money through missions, reached ever closer to that fabled death scythe status, soul count tallying up near fifty now. Spirit was relaxed and easy. When he went places, he took Stein with him. They became almost inseparable. 

Maybe they were actually friends, Stein thought. He trusted that they were. He felt comfortable saying that. Beyond this though, Spirit was not just his friend. Spirit was his best friend.

It didn't take long to turn sour again though, and when Christmas passed, and spring was on its way in, it did.


	7. Gay

Gay.

Homosexual.

Attracted to members of the same sex.

Less than.

Stupid.

Feminine.

"Stop it with all that gay shit."

The monster had a name. The name was internalization. All it took was one misplaced joke falling into Spirit's burning ears, and the glass house was a house of ruin. 

"Don't fucking touch me."

Kurt Cobain believed gay people deserved rights. Spirit calmed a bit. Kurt Cobain wasn't gay, but he wished he was because fuck homophobes. Spirit settled again. 

"I'm not though. I'm not gay. I like women."

Stein didn't know what to tell him about that. Certainly, Spirit did like women or he wouldn't sleep with so many, seek it out so much. 

Stein soothed him through multiple ups and downs, carried him through various states of acceptance and rejection. He felt like maybe it was a small return for Spirit easing him through his own highs and lows. 

It was the proper way to show gratitude. 

They talked sometimes about what would happen after they graduated. While Spirit was happy, he would always assure that he would still be there. They'd still be together. They'd be partners, and they'd get a house. That big graduation present everyone wanted.

They shared cigarettes mouth to mouth and Stein tried to keep him focused on the positive aspects. Once again, he found himself in drastically submissive situations. His knees got bruised pressing against the floor.

He wore bruises and bite marks under his shirt collars from moments when Spirit was intoxicated and unruly. Rumors were there, always just out of reach, being whispered in someone's ear. Stein was hyper aware of looks and mummers in the hallway, hoping that maybe if he noticed first he would be able to keep Spirit from hearing.

Of course he couldn't be there always and even if rumors weren't malevolent or being used to hurt, Spirit was sensitive. Stein didn't know why, couldn't ask, but he knew that he had a way of making Spirit believe that homophobia was bad. 

After a while, it stopped being so dire that there were rumors, Spirit got used to it.

More interviews on TV. More time passed. They gathered sponsorship for themselves, finished more missions, harder missions. They kept growing. 


	8. Queer

Queer.

Strange or odd.

To ruin something.

Gay.

No one really used the word queer in Death City. No one cared. Spirit was the only person Stein had heard holding on to it. He used it like a mace in a way that suggested it had been wielded against him before he'd ever wielded it against someone else.

That summer, Spirit's mother called him again. 

There'd been a death in the family.

Stein wasn't sure how she managed it, but the woman somehow got her son on the phone to tell him. Stein would never forget the empty smile that curled at the corner of Spirit's lips when he was told his father was sleeping with heavy coins on his worthless eyes.

"No" he said when his mother begged him to come to the funeral.

Stein didn't argue when he hung up the phone. He didn't bring it up either. Instead he waited in silence.

"I tried so hard to be worthy of a good father," he said one night, when they were sitting on the couch drinking. "In the end though all I was worth was a shitty dad."

"What do you remember best about him?" Stein asked.

"The smell of alcohol," Spirit said. "He drank high proof. Vodka sometimes Everclear. He'd drink and then when he sweated it would smell like his booze."

"You do that sometimes," Stein said absent mindedly. The silence that followed relieved him of all right to be absent in any way ever again.

"He was an ass. I hate him."

"He's dead now." That smile came back, slight, only half there.

"I tried to kill him once you know?" Spirit asked then.

"It was winter and it was snowing outside. He wanted to take me somewhere to do something I can't quite remember, but we were coming home, and we'd both been drinking-"

"How old were you?"

"Ten probably. Anyway, we were walking home, and he said something to me. God I can't remember what it was. It was something like," he paused, fingers grasping gently in the air. "Like, 'cut your hair, if you look any prettier a man might not be able to stop himself from raping you'."

"Wow."

"Not unusual," Spirit assured. "We were both drunk though, and my dad was kind of fuzzy from drinking too much all the time anyway. Like that was just his natural state. His brain was just going dark I guess, but I figured the road was icy so if I pushed him over he'd fall and crack his skull on it. Then, even if he didn't die from the impact, I could just leave him out there to freeze to death."

"You pushed him?"

"Yeah," Spirit said wistfully. "He fell like you expect people to fall in ring fights and then he laid there on the road and he was very still so I ran away. A few hours later what do you know, in comes my old man with a giant bruise on his temple, looking a little blue. I thought he was a vampire for a while and that he'd come back from the dead because I didn't give him a proper burial but then I realized he's not half witch. He's just a regular fucking demon."

They were sent pictures in the mail of old men sitting around an open casket drinking and of people celebrating together. Spirit threw them in the trash can and burned them. It was the only time Stein ever saw his father's face, eyes held shut by money like they once had been with booze. 

"He liked to hold me down sometimes," Spirit told him once. "I think he liked how it looked when I squirmed. I mean I couldn't tell you why, but he'd smile and he'd hold me down on the couch until I was scared he would kill me and then he'd laugh when I cried and he'd call me a girl."

Stein didn't know how to fix that. He floundered for a long time, trying to find a way that he could, but the truth was he couldn't. Whenever he got close enough to try, Spirit beat him back with his words. 

Words meant different things to Spirit, more intuitive things. Language was Spirit's gift after all. Words were his oyster.


	9. Crazy

Crazy.

Greatly enthusiastic.

Mentally deranged (mostly in a violent capacity).

Stein's personal brand of torment took the year off it seemed like. He got through more with less confusion and less panic. He saw less.

There were still the nights that he was kept awake by his own constructs. There were nights he forced himself to sit in total calm, facing his hallucinations, refusing to budge. Spirit caught him like that sometimes, chair facing an empty room as he stared his own projections in their stupid manufactured faces. But the nights weren't common.

On some of those occasions, Spirit would simply sit down next to him, pull up a chair, join his vigil and say nothing. He'd gotten done asking what Stein was doing staring at nothing for hours on end what felt like lifetimes ago. When Stein didn't think about it, it was hard to remember that they hadn't been together forever. Now though, the idea of having life without Spirit was so strange he had trouble imagining it.

Often, he had to remind himself that he lacked context and understanding in Spirit's life and could not speak as an authority. He was prone to getting carried away though.

Spirit chased away a lot of false monsters. He sent anxieties running.

Stein wished he was able to replicate that comfort for his partner. He doubted would though. 

"Look," Spirit said once, when things got really bad. "On the bright side there's always suicide. You could always just kill yourself and then it would be over and you wouldn't have to deal with it anymore."

"What about the rest of my life then?"

"What about rest of your life?"

"You know, the rest of it. The part that comes after the part I'm in right now. A human being can life to a hundred, let's say theoretically that human being has a hundred years allotted to them to live by default and then their actions in life effect how long they continue living. So my question is, If I die at fifteen, what happens to the other eighty five years of my life?"

"They're gone?"

"That's wasteful."

Spirit had seemed satisfied with that answer. 

They talked about dying often. Death was unironically constant in Death City.

It was unsurprising to note that Death City was home to the high school with the most deaths among students technically in the country. It was crazy how much death they'd seen and how much they had killed while enrolled in the curriculum. By modern standards they were dangers to society.


	10. Lover

Lover.

A person who likes or enjoys something specified.

A person involved in a sexual or romantic relationship with someone else. (usually in some unofficial capacity.)

Spirit went through sexual and romantic partners like most people went through dental floss trying to patch a jacket back together. He had a new one every week, which was why Stein's first response to Kaili was complete indifference. 

She was a class behind them, teetering on the edge of general academic student and field operative. Her partner was a pole arm named Dale whom she generally refereed to only as "the D". From what Stein learned not paying any real attention to her, Dale was a jackass, and Kaili needed a new partner. 

It really would have bothered him that she needed a new partner too, if Spirit wasn't so adamant about not having the same sort of resonance with her. "We tried," he explained once, "but it was different I guess, more like the kind of stuff we were doing when we first met. It seemed kind of childish."

Stein decided to allow the relationship, mostly because he didn't want to be controlling.

Of course, Kaili herself was actually interesting and intelligent unlike most of Spirit's female acquaintances, and eventually, she began to win Stein over as well.

That spring, a package came in the mail, and Kaili brought it in to set on the coffee table when she came over for a few rounds of competitive pong. Stein was pulverizing Spirit when she asked what it was, and Spirit gladly took the out in order to save his pride. 

"Scalpel,"

"Check."

There was a clay vase inside. It looked heavy and a bit poorly made. Spirit's face contorted in disgust. They watched his hands slowly crest the ridge of cardboard and delve into the box. With a great sound of skin on paper, he lifted it free and set it on the table. 

It was an unpainted urn with a placard on the front reading August Albarn. His mother had sent them his father's corpse in some strange parody of bringing your life partner home to meet the folks. Spirit's shoulders were shaking. He flipped the lid off of it unceremoniously so that it landed on the table with a resounding thunk and spun to a stand still.

The contents within were not as powdery and simple as Stein had expected, but rather looking down into the urn, there was a plethora of fragmented bone bits which still retained their porous shape speaking of melted marrows. A few strands of red hair clung to a bit of skull which Spirit lifted experimentally out of its resting place, admiring how it had managed to escape the flames so with an air of utter revulsion. He dropped it then, stood up, undid the fastenings of his pants, and pissed onto his father's remains. 

The smell of urine and beer mixed with the musk of ashen corpse into a nauseating olfactory experience. 

Spirit then turned to the kitchen and retrieved superglue and a sharpie from within the junk drawer. He sealed the urn shut with his piss coagulating inside and wrote something that was likely very offensive in Ukrainian underneath the little plaque. Then, seemingly as calm as he'd ever been, Spirit packed his father back up into his box, and taped the whole thing shut again. 

"I need to go to the post office."

He came back three hours later, and slumped onto the couch dramatically. Stein watched out of the corner of is eye as Kaili ran her hands through his hair, pretending to be focused on the television. Spirit, of course feeling shaken by the reminder of his parents existence, would need her to reaffirm his unnecessary machismo.

It would only be days later that he could let Stein touch him again. Kaili was safe and warm and feminine, and while Stein resented that he couldn't be Spirit's constant comfort, her presence was beneficial in that Spirit seemed to bounce back faster. Of course Stein wasn't stupid enough to miss their physical similarities 

She was smart enough too, or at least he believed this most of the time. There were things she would say, small illusions she would make toward understanding the complexities of Spirit's partnership with Stein, but she never made them to Spirit. Her conscientiousness was admirable, Stein often felt like she was better apt to navigate his partner than he was himself.


	11. Parent

Parent.

Father or mother.

Someone on whom a younger individual can rely on regardless of circumstance. 

Spirit needed nurturing. Kaili gave it without a second thought. Stein sat on the couch and smoked his way through pack after pack of cigarettes. Sometimes, she sat next to him and stole them out of his mouth. She was blonde and thin and perfectly Spirit's type.

"Did your partner really turn all the portraits in the hall of remembrance upside down?" she asked one day.

"No, that was me."

It had been an incident about a year back, Stein had gotten pissed at Death for some reason he couldn't remember and inverted all of the portraits of the famous Death Scythes in an act of rebellion. Spirit had taken the fall to make up for pissing in the hamper instead of the toilet. 

She laughed heartily at the explanation. 

Summer was on its way back in, and the unbearable heat was steadily climbing into the 80's already. Their building's air conditioning hadn't stopped running in what seemed like a week. Stein was grateful they had air and that no one was being stingy with it. He was absolutely positive that all of the oxygen outside was literally on fire. 

He remembered the snow that had used to cover their winters in Germany with a vagueness that spoke of just how many years had passed since he joined the DWMA. Only three really, but it seemed three was long enough for it to feel like Germany had been a fabrication. 

Of course there were repercussions to the air running constantly. At night, when Spirit went to bed, and took Kaili with him, Stein would bed down on the couch, and shiver until the sun came up.

"You want me to sleep on the couch tonight?" Kaili asked. She'd been staying at their house for a week now after they came to a mutual agreement that Dale was an asshole and no one should be partnered with or forced to live with an asshole. 

"He's your boyfriend."

"Isn't he sort of yours too?"

"Careful saying that out loud or he'll hear you and have a fit."

Silence.

"It just doesn't sit right with me. If either of us has a claim it's you."

"Stop being so logical, you might break the part of your brain that's actually human."

She snickered. "You're always so worried about that," she said. "You know I'm autistic?"

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, so there's plenty of people already who don't think I'm human."

"It's bullshit." He was quietly jealous that she had a name for her a-typicality. 

"Maybe," she said softly. Spirit's problem was opposite theirs. He was too human, too attuned to those around them. If truly their failing came from an inability to empathize, then Spirit's was due to the strength of his empathy.

"Why is he so scared of being near you?" Kaili asked.

"Because his father was only a dad," Stein said. "And a homophobic one at that. You try having a healthy relationship with another boy after growing up with an asshole like August. I mean, I hate myself a little more just knowing that fuck bag ever lived, and I never even met him."

"Why don't we date then?"

Stein blinked at her owlishly, waiting for elaboration. "Like you and me?"

"Yeah," she said. "I'll date Spirit, and you'll date me."

"At the same time?"

"Yeah."

"Can you even do that?"

"My parents did."

Kaili was French. Her birth mother had been a disaporic Japanese woman who'd been completely taken with the idea of free love when she met Kaili's other parents.

"I thought you didn't have the best relationship with them."

"I didn't, but it wasn't because they were in open relationships."

"And you think Spirit would agree to it?"

"Well apparently it's not like you're dating him, and he'd be pretty hypocritical telling anyone they couldn't sleep around, wouldn't he?"

Kaili was smart. Stein liked her intelligence. Honestly, he liked her, she was by far not the worst of Spirit's long term pulls, and even if he'd wanted to resent her at first, he hadn't managed. 

"Alright, you're on." 

She smiled widely. 

"Do you know what this means?" she asked.

"What?"

"I don't have to feel like a thief anymore, do I?"

The fact that she'd ever felt like a thief for this endeared her to him.

The following few weeks were strange because a number of things happened. He and Kaili began to date in a way that was nothing near serious. Really, it was more the two of them hanging out around town and holding hands on occasion. Expected outcome. 

Unexpected outcome: Spirit's fascination with the whole idea, threesomes, Marie insisting that they had to be study partners on every group assignment they could have had together, Azusa's wrath.

Spirit made fun of him for having girl troubles. Sid warned him against living the life of a player like his partner did.

It was one of those times that Stein felt his inability to connect with other humans was wholly justifiable because look at them. Look at those crazy assholes. Kaili laughed at them with him, in a show of solidarity that made it all feel normal and acceptable for the first time in his life. He decided that he really, honestly liked her, and it was only the second time in his life he'd done that.

When they fell into step together, Stein honestly felt a bit like they were the parents, and Spirit was their child. And regardless of anything Stein knew he had somehow managed to become a better father than August Albarn.


	12. Friend

Friend.

Someone you share mutual affection with. 

Kaili was Stein's first friend. Having her there answered a number of questions, especially those regarding his feelings towards Spirit. 

Toward the beginning of their relationship, Stein had been afraid that the affection he felt toward his partner was nothing above normal levels of affection, and something platonic he was mistaking for more. This had never been the case in even the slightest way, namely because what he felt for Spirit definitely wasn't more than what he felt for Kaili. In fact, he felt the same amount for the both of them, the only difference being the nature of the emotion.

If Stein wasn't in love with Spirit he was of the same flesh. The way they fit together was almost uncanny in its ease.

They spent the summer lazing about together, their legs tangled up on the bed despite the heat outside. Cigarettes got passed hand by hand from mouth to mouth around in circles between them. Kaili collected physical memories of their life, admonishing on how even when the memories faded, objects would bridge the gap back to old feelings and lost moments. Stein admired the poetry of how she talked, tried to emulate it slightly, adapt it into his own version of her romanticism.

Spirit relaxed. The school year started. In Utero dropped.

There was a frenzy in all of September surrounding that album, and when they finally had their hands on it, they were like a pair of giddy children. Courtney Love had had a baby and Kurt Cobain had married her. It looked so perfect between the legal struggles. Spirit talked all the time about how his life would be just like that.

"I'll marry Kaili, and we can all have a baby," he said.

Stein tried to imagine them raising a child together in a house. It was picturesque and unreal, but there was something in him that craved it the same way he craved to prove his mother wrong about everything. He imagined growing up, moving in with Spirit, raising a kid just the three of them, and calling his mother to let his child blabber over the phone happily, forever destroying the horrible notion that he was, at his foundation, toxic.

"You'll have to ask Kaili about that."

Spirit didn't seem worried. He mimed plucking chords to Heart-Shaped Box.

Part of the reward for making Death Scythe included security deposit on a house that matched certain parameters. Due to efficiency, it was agreed that Stein and Kaili would officially file was joint partners, alternating who took Spirit on which missions based on skill level and availability. 

In October, they made 99 souls, and Stein took out an assignment stalking a witch. Mantis Shrimp familiar, she'd seemed ridiculous until he took a hit from one of her claws across the bridge of his nose and things blurred. Blood dripped into his vision from somewhere, he wasn't sure where as his whole face was numb, and that was all he could see, the focus alternating, she was like a shapeless mass in the background of his world.

They beat a retreat, Spirit leading him out of her little cave by nudging him through their resonance and shouting directions when it failed. Stein spent three weeks in the hospital. His left eye had ruptured slightly and it was only due to immediate care that he would be able to see out of it at all. His right was slightly more blurred, but he could still see vague shapes out of it, as opposed to the other one which saw the world as a haze of light and colors now. The doctor told him that it might improve, but not to hope on it.

Thankfully, it seemed that Stein's ability to perceive souls had nothing to do with his eyesight and he could compensate for lack of ability to see others physically by watching the fluctuations of their souls. In all, it wasn't exactly the end of the world. Within three days he had adapted. By the time he was out of the hospital, he could see things relatively well out of his right eye. He would have a scar on his face for the rest of his life though.

Spirit said it was badass. Kaili took out the witch and made him Death Scythe. Before Stein knew what was going on, they were looking at new houses, and he had to wear glasses.

It was really surreal. Spirit insisted on something with an open floor plan so it would be easier for Stein to navigate. Stein had to assure him multiple times that he wasn't nearly so blind as they'd thought he would be, and that his right eye was actually recovering. Spirit remained insistent.

By January, they were moving in. Stein called his mother just before Spirit's seventeenth birthday, and told her all about it. He could hear his step sisters arguing in the background, his little brother asking when dinner would be done. She stuttered an amazed response, as if the idea that her son could function was something alien.

She was a therapist, and he lacked a fundamental faith in humanity because of that.


	13. Relationship

Relationship.

The way in which two or more people are connected.

A sexual or romantic involvement.

They graduated together in even step. Summer was spent making decisions. 

Spirit applied for a job at the DWMA and was granted it instantaneously. Stein applied for a number of colleges and got in to seven or eight of them. He slowly whittled the list down until he was choosing from the ones closets to home. Kaili threw a middle finger at anyone who suggested she should have to work immediately out of school when she'd just made a death scythe. She spent her time forcing Spirit to make her coffee, and promised that once she'd had a good gap year she'd figure things out.

Stein collected courses like trophies, and found himself utterly baffled by just how many things he wanted to study. He spent time with Kaili, trying to figure out a major, and realizing that really he just wanted to go to school for the rest of his life. She painted him pictures to try and cheer him up, and eventually pressured him into sketching things for her. 

Everybody laughed easily. They paid bills. Spirit proved he had no idea how to manage a check book, and Stein picked up a class that covered it. Kaili decided she wanted to write poetry, and they'd gather around when she felt proud of herself and listened to her read it. She was working on an anthology, and when Stein was home, she used him like a walking hybrid dictionary/thesaurus. 

Spirit often came home and found them throwing words at each other, testing ideas or phrases as Stein studied.

He passed his first semester with A's, B's, and the occasional C, and decided he wanted to be a surgeon. Christmas break rolled up on them, and Kaili, gave them a positive pregnancy test in a gift wrapped box. Spirit just about had a heart attack. 

January was ideas for a nursery and Spirit pestering her about who's baby it probably was. April, Kaili's blood pressure started rising, and Kurt Cobain killed himself.

It was like the earth had dropped out from beneath them. Spirit was reeling. All that positivity built up on the back of an unwilling idol, crumbling back down into nothingness. Kaili was diagnosed with hypertension and put on bed rest. Stein dropped classes, and picked up a part time job at the DWMA.

Kaili got sicker, and sicker. Panic began to prickle underneath Stein's skin. Spirit didn't get out of bed anymore unless plied with substances. 

The baby was in danger. Doctors were in the house day and night. Kaili was in danger. Stein spent his free time pouring over books about pregnancy, trying to find a way to combat it. Only known cure for hypertension: abortion.

Kaili refused the option.

"I'm having this fucking baby if it kills me," she hissed over and over.

He handed her a form, signing her care into his hands, and she put her signature at the bottom. By July, she'd stabilized. 

That was the month that the DWMA decided to make a move on Hoshizoku. Spirit and Stein were both deployed in Japan with Sid Barett, Mira Nygus, and Justin Law with orders to seek and destroy. By the time they got back to Death City it was August, and Kaili was going into labor.

Spirit left Stein with Sid and their acquisition to attend to her after being assured that Stein would be right after him.

He crashed the night on Sid's couch after word that he wasn't needed at the hospital. At noon the next day, Mira told him that Spirit had taken Kaili and the baby home. 

The first time Stein ever saw her, Spirit was holding her in the living room, bouncing gently from one foot to the other. She was this tiny thing with little whips of blonde hair licking off the top of her head. One look at her and all assurances were that she was Spirit's kid, but that just made him love her more. 

"Name?" he asked, insurmountably embarrassed when his voice came out slightly strained.

"Maka." 

For the first time since April, Spirit looked happy.


	14. Home

Home.

A place you are always safe and welcome.

Kaili was whispering in Spirit's ear when Stein brought the baby into the room. Spirit looked embarrassed when they'd been caught, but Kaili just looked wary of him.

"Give her to me," she insisted quickly, and Stein did, watching as the woman took Maka, and squirreled her away in her arms with a soft "shh, baby". Stein swallowed around an uneasy feeling in his throat.

Spirit put a hand on Stein's shoulder, and steered him out of the room. "Hey," he said, once they were in the hallway, he thumbed his upper lip and cast a glance back through the bedroom door. "So Kai's a bit shook up after the whole ordeal, and she's kind of antsy. You think you could give her some space?"

"Have I been crowding her?"

"No, you're just making her uncomfortable."

Stein's brain stuttered. "What did I do?"

"I don't know. I'm sure it'll all blow over in a little while, just give it a couple days, do you wanna keep crashing at Sid and Nygus?"

Numbly, Stein nodded along. 

He let Spirit drive him, and ignored the side glances Sid and Mira gave each other when he explained the situation. He didn't want to think about it. He didn't want to think about it. He didn't want to think about it.

He went to sleep with whispers in the back of his head spitting and hissing and bubbling up out of his spine. He dreamt that his body was a husk and he shed it, crawling out of his own back like some fucked up monster. Sid woke him up the next morning, asking him to watch the acquisition while he made breakfast with Mira.

"What's his name?" Stein asked.

"Black Star. White Star wrote me about him just before the whole thing went down."

"Why is his hair blue?"

"You know I ain't got the faintest. Like normally, a baby's just not supposed to look like that, but hey I ain't gonna question it too much. I mean, I saw my best friend mutate. Blue haired baby? That's like the least weird thing in my life right now."

"What are you gonna do with him?"

Sid paused in whipping pancake batter. "I don't know," he said. "Don't tell I told, but it turns out Mira and I can't have kids."

"Why?"

"It just wouldn't work, trust me."

"So you're thinking of keeping him?"

"I don't know, maybe. I mean we live in Death City, there's a huge Japanese population, and one of our" he mimed quotes in the air "national languages is Japanese, he won't be cut off or nothing so it probably won't matter so much for his self esteem that he looks different than we do because we are a modern hub of immigration, and where else is he gonna go? An orphanage? That damn baby has blue fuckin' hair."

Stein laughed softly, watching Black Star chew fervently on his knuckles. He and Maka would probably grow up friends. Maybe they'd be partners when they were enrolling in the DWMA. It seemed weird. He could imagine them holding hands on the first day of kindergarten because they didn't know any of the other kids. 

"He's cute," Stien said.

"Yeah I know, and it's already a problem."

"Mira can't resist?"

"What do you mean, Mira? I can't fuckin' resist. I love babies."

Mira made the eggs, and laughed at Sid trying to feed himself as Black Star lunged for everything that moved. She was as always kind but aloof, offering cursory sympathy but not much else. He kind of appreciated that about her though. he could always trust her not to take his business personally.

"How old are you?" she asked the second night he stayed on their couch, as they were eating dinner.

"Seventeen."

"God, you are so young. You've got so much life ahead of you, I say you cut ties and you count your losses because if you do it now, you'll have the time to make up for how much you wasted on your skinny little shit head and his baby momma."

No. This was going to blow over. It always blew over. Spirit would smooth things out.

On the third day, no one called, and Stein decided he was sick of waiting. He caught a bus home.

His key didn't fit the lock. He rang the doorbell.

There was movement inside, and Spirit opened the door.

"Hey," he said, the word oddly drawn out. Stein narrowed his eyes suspiciously, trying to appraise his partner. There was something of a wall between them, as if the grooves their continued relative existence had carved into their souls had been sculpied over, erased. Stein felt like he hardly knew him.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"Bullshit nothing. You changed the lock."

Spirit's face dropped, as if pretenses could no longer float. He looked deadly serious. "Because you're dangerous," he said.

Nausea. 

This wasn't real.

His mind stuttered over formulating a response, and all he managed to do was shake his head. "I don't," he said, fully on the way to admonishing that he didn't fucking understand when Spirit cut him off. 

"Kaili doesn't feel safe with you anymore. She said when she was pregnant, you tried to kill her so you could keep the baby."

"What, and you believe that? She's clearly suffering from postpartum hysteria, with proper medication-"

"You're not putting my wife on anymore medication."

"What the fuck, Spirit, I'm your partner."

"You were."

Silence deadened around them, stiffened. Coagulated like Spirit's piss in an urn of ashes.

"What did she tell you?"

"The little scars."

"Spirit that was back then. So much has changed since then. You can't hold that against me. I'm not the same person I was when I was thirteen, and you're not either. I don't hold your thirteen-year-old shit against you."

"I don't have time for this. Don't make me file a restraining order."

Stein went back to Sid's house. Kaili filed the restraining order so Spirit wouldn't have to. Then, she filed a complaint, and took him to court. Despite none of the evidence adding up to him attempting her murder, and the fact that after treatment both Kaili and the baby made a full recovery, he was charged with reckless endangerment and, for her mental health, sentenced to a year of house arrest.

Spirit watched as they slapped an ankle bracelet on him and did nothing. Stein didn't do anything either. It was agreed that he would be kept in the DWMA holding cells until proper housing arrangements were made for him.

Lord Death gave him a lab just outside of town sort of as an apology. He filled it with books, and a computer, and essentially sent Stein back to school so that he could be an expert informant. The walls, looked like the inside of his head within days as he crept back out of his human disguise and mutated the same way White Star had.

That's what monsters did. That's what happened when sanity was lost.

He read so many books trying to keep it at bay, and still when he stopped there it was.

Marie visited often, and she was about the only person who did. Sid called sometimes. Marie liked to cook him food and make sure he was eating. 

She got re-located to Oceania. No one came. Only business called.


End file.
